With the economy in turmoil, marketers are looking to make every penny accountable and everybody count.
Social media campaigns can be comparatively inexpensive, but are still viewed as risky by some brand managers. Is this the right time for your company to start leveraging social media?
Much like investors, marketers have widely ranging appetites for risk. Marketers in the entertainment and publishing industries, for example, have a reputation for being “risk takers” — companies like HBO and Miramax push boundaries and break new ground with the kinds of bold, creative concepts that have come to be associated with viral marketing and social media.
On the other end of the spectrum, however, are brand managers who work in more heavily regulated industries, like pharmaceuticals or financial services. Pharmaceutical marketers are known for their frugality and skepticism regarding new tactics and “quirky” creative. The attitude of marketers in such industries reflects the realities of the regulatory and legal review processes through which their best-laid plans must always be vetted.
Whereas a year ago it would have been difficult even to get a foot in the door to pitch social media to a pharmaceutical client, today every pharmaceutical brand manager I talk with asks me how he or she should be approaching social media. This post-traumatic sensibility was how I knew that social media marketing — and especially social media optimization — had finally “made the jump” into the mainstream. It is a clear sign of the maturation of social media marketing.
Furthermore, it’s not just the marketers who are interested in interacting with brands through social media. A recent study by the Cone agency showed that 85% of consumers believe that companies should be interacting with consumers through social channels. The same study also suggests that six out of 10 Americans use social media to interact with companies on social media Web sites.
Where does a smart brand manager start? The multitude of opportunities can be broken into three categories:
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Social media optimization, which can be thought of as a logical extension of search engine optimization
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Word-of-mouth marketing
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Social media advertising, or an extension of your brands’ “traditional” search and display media buys
There are plusses and minuses to all three tracks, but each has its own part to play in the overall media mix. Defining that mix can be tricky — the process typically starts with a solid benchmark. This means understanding where and how your audience uses the social Web. Once the ideal mix of social media marketing tactics has been defined, optimization is usually the first area of concentration.
Social media optimization is a set of tactics that can help engage users in new ways, increase a brand’s visibility across the Web, and make content easier for users to share. The goal is to create a visible presence within social media channels, and to leverage best practices to increase visibility on both traditional and social search engines. This is accomplished by optimizing the messaging, creating new content and reposting existing pieces of content.
Another common use of social media is word-of-mouth marketing. One of the most common starting points is for companies to create a branded presence (e.g., a fan page, a profile or a group) within existing virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace. Other companies, from Abbott Labs to Saturn, have bypassed or de-emphasized their presences on the existing social media sites, and instead created their own communities around their own brands and products, with varying degrees of success.
While such campaigns are typically less expensive than other forms of marketing, they are still far from free. A company may decide to build its own communities or join established ones, but either route requires a nearly constant and, more important, consistent investment of time on the part of at least one person, or a new retainer to the public relations company.
The most common mistake is to build a social media presence without first checking the scale of the target presence versus the commitment involved. What if Facebook isn’t the right venue? What if a MySpace page doesn’t turn out to be such a good fit? My advice is to hire a company to, at the very least, benchmark the size of your target across the different social media communities. This means addressing the size of discussions in places such as Wikipedia, Delicious and Twitter.
There are no guarantees in advertising, and there will always be an element of risk, but solid research upfront can make a big difference in the outcome.
Joseph Fullman is a strategist and social media guru at Greater Than One, a full-service, independent digital marketing agency. He can be reached at [email protected].
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